July 13th, 1999

Bek gave me flowers again today.

It's been months. I'm not sure if that's because they were out of season, because he lost interest, or because he just forgot. He did it once, then stopped. I thought it was sweet, at first. Sort of endearing. His way of apologizing for getting caught all those months ago, for forcing the humans to tear down that tourist zoo. It was a rather large error on his part, but he was just a child.

In fact, he is six weeks older than me.

Unfortunately, I'm beginning to realize that his motivation is not solely my forgiveness.

I have matured in those months. I've grown to about four inches shy of full-size. My head blades curve forward like an adult's now. I can cut even through tadlar branches—those bigger than six inches in diameter—with a single swipe of my elbow blade. It's sort of an unofficial coming-of-age test, but I completed it weeks before I should have been able, when I realized the grain of the wood was easier to cut at an oblique angle.

And Bek started giving me flowers daily ten days after he cut through his own first tadlar branch.

I accept them, of course, and intentionally misunderstand. Not that I think it matters. I could tell him outright, "I will never be your mate," but he wouldn't care. I cannot hurt him. There is no real emotion in his decision. Nothing personally invested I can disrupt, except for his quest each day to find me flowers. Hork-Bajir follow a much simpler system for pairing off than humans or hruthin.

Hruthin seem to have cemented themselves in a rigid, unwavering flow chart of attraction, courtship, and marriage. Do I find this person attractive? If yes, move to step two. If no, start over. Are her feelings reciprocal? If yes, move to step three. If no, start over. Do our parents approve of the choice? If yes, move to step four, et cetera et cetera.

Humans, on the other hand, have a bizarre, self-contradictory system that they themselves don't seem to understand. I like him, but I don't like him. Big eyes are cute, but hers are kind of scary-big. I like spending money, but she makes too much of it. No wonder more than half of their books consist of advice or emotional scenarios about human mating rituals. They can't agree on anything and the more they understand it, the less it seems to comfort them.

Hork-Bajir, on the other hand, view mating as a somewhat pleasurable chore. Cut bark, swing through branches, make kawatnoj. Just another task to accomplish.

And, somehow paradoxically, they are more faithfully monogamous than either humans or hruthin. The feeling of love and the security of marriage is irrelevant to them. Complex desires like emotional fulfillment and the search for a soul mate do not play into the decision of who to pick. The two must agree, yes, but once they do, the search is over. They make kawatnoj if they can, provide for each other, protect each other from dangers. Their bond is strong, but without the inconvenience and spark that hruthin and humans seem obsessed with. It is natural, powerful, uncomplicated.

Something I myself can never indulge.

Bek's daily delivery of flowers is a signal that he would like to be my mate. I cannot hurt him by refusing. If I do, he will choose someone else. What has drawn him to me is both a mystery and irrelevant. I am a fit, able-bodied female his age. Good enough.

And yet, I cannot bring myself to refuse him. Though my people may not understand the heartbreak and pain of romantic rejection, I do, and though I realize intellectually that I will not hurt Bek, I can't stand the anxiety of knowing that I should. That telling him he will never be my mate should crush him, even though I know he will shrug and begin delivering his flowers to someone else. Perhaps I don't refuse because I like the attention. Perhaps I cannot stand the jealousy of his attention focusing elsewhere.

So I accept his flowers. And my heart breaks a little as I realize the thought he is putting into it—he recognized my somewhat surprised and confounded reaction when he brought a bouquet of grass to me, he saw how I smiled when he brought me an Indian paintbrush. They are my favorite. The next day, he brought me two. And since then, he has continually brought me a bouquet of six every day, and they get more and more beautiful and vibrant as time goes on. I'm beginning to think he's irrigating them, picking bouquets for days in advance and nursing them to their most bloomed, healthy condition. It makes me feel terrible. It makes me feel guilty.

It makes me feel good.

No, I realize my place in my community. I need to remain celibate, unencumbered by personal attachments. Even my people would recognize that I would favor my own kalashu and kawatnoj over theirs. I need to be like the leaders of old, the Biblical ones far removed in humanity from their people. I need not to introduce politics, even of an intellectually limited kind, into the valley.

We have more than enough to worry about.

The weather has been dry lately, which makes the bark difficult to harvest and unhearty. We've had to start venturing farther and farther into the forest to find trees we haven't touched. And every time we go farther, my stomach drops a little more. We continue to expand, and we will never contract. I would be failing my mission if we did. The free Hork-Bajir are flourishing, and the more they flourish, the more resources they consume. I cannot express how much anxiety this fills me with.

If all goes as it should, if we and the humans win our war against the Yeerks, and humanity itself learns of the existence of extra-terrestrial life, we will be completely at their mercy. I've been to my planet; I know we can't return. Not for many, many years, not until it has a chance to recover from what the Yeerks and hruthin have done to it. It's a wasteland. And, as immigrants to this planet, the humans will have to decide what to do with us.

I've read how humans treat immigrants. It does not fill me with hope.

We will be a novelty at first, of course. They will assign us some land, if they are at their best. We will be eternally grateful, and they will have that smug superior feeling humans love to have, that they are helping a less privileged race without having to accept any real sacrifice. They will come, take pictures, and I will instruct my people to indulge them, even though I know that will not pacify them forever.

But the novelty will wear off.

Soon, they will stop visiting. News stories about the first Hork-Bajir baby born in captivity, about some poor carving an untalented and therefore exceptional young Hork-Bajir made, about times our zoo will be closed for renovation will start to diminish. For some length of time I cannot predict but hope is lengthy, we will be ignored, left alone, allowed to prosper in peace.

And then it will change.

Then, the news stories will return. Hork-Bajir population reaches record highs, accompanied by pictures of forests we've decimated. Stories about curious youth that I simply cannot control who've damaged property, trespassed, maybe even harmed some humans will begin to surface. Angry, militant humans upset about their lack of control in other areas of their life will begin to call for laws, new treaties, bans. They will scream and shout at their political representatives, TV personalities will take positions for and against our cause. But the more we grow, the more evidence we will feed the opposition. Beyond that, I only imagine what will happen in my darkest hours. I imagine concentration camps filled with my people, fed sawdust to sustain us. I imagine vigilante humans with hunting dogs scouring the forests for renegades so they can kill them and hang my people's heads on their hunting lodge walls. I imagine painful diasporas as my people are shipped across country, as their feet bleed, overpacked into dark, unsanitary trucks. I imagine a group of my people, leaderless, dumped into some greatly inhospitable preserve, filled with dust and tumbleweeds and not a single tree anywhere on the horizon.

And, on my particularly dark days, I remind myself that this is the best possible scenario.

We cannot fight them. And, as intruders to their planet, I would not want us to. The humans would win any war we could wage. Here, on this faraway world with bitter-tasting trees and a constant, unremitting foul stench on the air, we are powerless.

And yet, when my people ask what the homeworld is like, since most of them are too young to have been born there, and I am the only one fortunate enough to have visited, I lie.

That was tonight. The Animorphs completed their mission to tear down the truck depot on Saturday, which allowed me to recover from five nights of raids in a row. I slept quite a long time last night, and completely ignored a rather loud and long-lasting argument between Teb and Brik. I could not fall back asleep when Brik began wailing for her mother, who is either dead or still infested, but I did not climb down my tree.

In order to make up for that cold oversight, I gathered my people in the heart of our community and built a rather large bonfire fueled by discarded husks and untasty kindling that my people like to drop when they're done with. It's sort of a monthly ritual I've started. As their collective mother, I clean up after them and then tell them a bed time story.

"Tell us about homeworld, Toby," Pret said.

I gazed around the orange, flickering, ethereal faces circled around the fire, noticing several I did not recognize. Some of the Controllers we'd taken in our raids were now free of their Yeerks. I felt a swell of pride in my belly, the only thing that could combat the hopelessness I felt when I imagined the future.

I noticed the Hork-Bajir who had grabbed my ankle the night I freed him. For some reason, his gaze unsettled me.

"What would you like to know?" I asked.

"Tell us what sky look like," Teb said.

"The sky is dark at night, and pink during the day. It's very narrow above our heads. Long mountains rise up in the east and west, make the sky like the underflesh of the tree when you cut a strip of bark from it."

I heard murmuring around the group as my people clarified among themselves, discussed what I meant.

"Tell us what tree taste like," another voice chimed in.

"The trees are very moist." Confusion. "Wet, taste like when you eat Earth tree and then drink water." Acceptance. "They are sweet, but not too sweet. Salty, but not too salty. And some of the trees ooze green when you bite into them."

"I like green ooze," one voice said.

"Brown ooze too sticky! Taste like ear wax!" another barked. A few of my people laughed in agreement.

"And I tried one tree, one tree whose bark was so soft it was like biting into velvet. Like curling up against your mother when you're an infant, like swinging in a long arc through the branches, and wondering if you're not going to make it, if you're going to fall to your death, but feeling the springy tip of the next branch against the tip of your fingers and grabbing it so tight that your hand bleeds. Like waking up and smelling the smoke from the fire, and remembering the great night you spent with close friends the night before, curled up against two people you don't know for warmth, smiling at them when you wake up. It tasted like feeling not alone anymore."

Most of my people were confused. I raised my fingers to my eyes and found tears. I didn't know why they were there.

"Toby Hamee tell more," the Hork-Bajir missing an ear said. I looked up at him again, felt another shiver of unsettlement. He was very tall, very broad. Strong. Athletic, even by Hork-Bajir standards, and the firelight danced on his powerful form, his long, shining blades. As I gazed at him, I was thinking about adding him to my task force, if I could convince him, if I could train him.

Then I realized I wasn't thinking about that at all.

"I…uh…it's…" I stammered. My people seemed confused, distraught. Toby Hamee never didn't know what to say. He continued to gaze, and his eyes narrowed.

"It's like…it's like that feeling when you know things will never be the same again," I said. "Like realizing things have changed forever, and maybe that's not such a bad thing."

I left my people after that. I never leave on bonfire night, but I couldn't stay. I went to my tree and continued reading Alexander Hamilton's biography, but I couldn't focus.

"How very inconvenient," I muttered to myself as I rested and, once again, sleep did not come.